Looking to purchase the 2.9 Ghz 21.5 inch version of the new iMac next week. Not looking for a gaming machine but i'm wondering how Battlefield 3 performs on the new system (FPS). I've seen a few demo's of it running on single player however I would like to know if anyone has tried it on multi-player, thanks.

Also if anyone has tried Arma 2 (FPS and what settings it performs best with)...

It is bad form to bump your own thread, particularly <20 min after you started it.

__________________The rising People, hot and out of breath,
Roared round the palace: "Liberty or death!"
"If death will do," the King said, "let me reign;
You'll have, I'm sure, no reason to complain."

Looking to purchase the 2.9 Ghz 21.5 inch version of the new iMac next week. Not looking for a gaming machine but i'm wondering how Battlefield 3 performs on the new system (FPS). I've seen a few demo's of it running on single player however I would like to know if anyone has tried it on multi-player, thanks.

Also if anyone has tried Arma 2 (FPS and what settings it performs best with)...

Arma 2/Day Z laggs on full fledge 680's. The 21.5" iMacs most likely will only run at the absolute worst settings, and even then its performance might be more than questionable.

The game is just horrible written, and lacks any optimization at all. If you wish to play the game on a mac you'll have to rely on 680MX or Mac Pro with 680's or higher. Would be interesting to know though, more so for the 680MX though honestly.

This however, is entirely speculative, given there have been no benchmarks on those games thus far, not even with the 680MX. But given that games history, it doesn't look good.

I'm not sure if I would call that ok, though I'm sure the screen recording took a toll. Frames are dropping and the screen is tearing at every turn.

In any case, I went through and selected the model you saw in the video (at the bottom due to it being the weakest), and the models currently available with the new iMac's.

To put it simply, yes they are all more powerful, however the starting GPU is only a little more powerful than that ATI (though given the 640 is nvidia, the drivers are probably a lot better...).

Then lastly, the 680MX is more or less the standard for mobile GPU's.

For you however, with the 2.9 model you'll be using the 660M, which according to that same site will get you ~37FPS at high settings for BF3. So it looks to be pretty great for it there. Ultra however, is out of the question.

I'm being intentionally (perhaps a little too?) conservative, as a 100% increase in performance in 3DMark doesn't often translate to the same increase in the real-world.

From real framerate tests conducted by Apple and available on their Performance page for the iMac, the 680MX does 50-60% better than the 6970m, and the 650M does 20-40% better than the 6770m.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Malone1878

Looking to purchase the 2.9 Ghz 21.5 inch version of the new iMac next week. Not looking for a gaming machine but i'm wondering how Battlefield 3 performs on the new system (FPS). I've seen a few demo's of it running on single player however I would like to know if anyone has tried it on multi-player, thanks.

BF3 isn't a good choice here. "Not wanting a gaming machine" and "want to play Battlefield 3" don't go well together; BF3 is a very demanding game. Your 650M model will run it passably with many settings turned down.